In the nature of things

Kathleen Jamie began writing poetry at school and her first book was published when she was 20. She has won many awards for her writing, which has focused on Scottish landscape and culture as well as on Muslim Asia, but despite critical acclaim she is not widely known. Her new collection of essays reflects on personal pain as well as the natural world

Kathleen Jamie raises her binoculars and fixes them on a line of birds gliding to a stop on the flat, silvered waters of the Eden Estuary. They land in formation, soundless across the sun-bleached Fife sandflats. "Eider ducks," she says and smiles. The binoculars are new, and powerful, heavy in the hand. Jamie had them with her the previous day on a trip to the Isle of May where she spent hours observing the seabirds that crowd the steeply rising volcanic plug at the mouth of the Firth of Forth. Her face is still pink from sun and wind, but she laughs at the suggestion that she might be a twitcher.

"I never chase around looking for rarities. I'm not a twitcher in that sense, but I would travel to the Isle of May to see all the guillemots stacked on the ledges. I don't like rarities but I do like things being as they ought to be."

Things as they ought to be: a pebble picked from a Hebridean beach, "a perfect sphere of white quartz, that fitted the palm of my hand", a corncrake, "like a votive statue hidden in the grass". A river: "When [it] ran over stones, it glinted. In its slower places, it held a touch of blue, borrowed from the sky."

This has become her trademark, simplicity in seeing, a willingness to look, the resulting poetry and prose, "as close as writing gets", said writer Richard Mabey in a review of her latest book, Findings, "to a conversation with the natural world".

Last week, Jamie, 42, garnered her 10th major writing award, winning the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Prize for The Tree House, having won the Forward Prize last year for the collection of poems that the judges said challenged the way contemporary poets described nature.

That conversation with landscape and with life is stronger still in her latest offering. Findings, a collection of prose essays, is unlike anything Jamie has produced before, and is much more personal than her previous work, after what has been a traumatic period for her and her family. A mother incapacitated by a stroke, a husband's illness, a grandparent's decline, are played out against small journeys, explorations, and experiences from her life. She travelled to Orkney for the winter solstice, studied the salmon leaping on the Braan river, raised her eyes to Edinburgh's skyline, watched the peregrines that had nested near her home.

"Between the laundry and fetching kids from school, that's how birds enter my life. I listen. During a lull in the traffic: oyster catchers; in the school playground, sparrows," she says.

"I have real difficulty finding a category for Findings," she continues, sitting on a sea-washed log cast up on the farthest reaches of St Andrews's west sands. This mountain-biking mother-of-two has jumped at the chance to eschew meeting in a restaurant or office for a walk on the beach on a glorious day. She takes her binoculars, but not the penknife she often carries; the one she once used to cut off a dead gannet's head. She wanted to bleach the skull as a thing of beauty for her writing desk.

"I don't think there is a category. I have been asking around. Here's my book. Please tell me what this is? It's not nature writing, but it is; it's not autobiography, but it is; it's not travel writing, but it is. I think some Americans call this creative non- fiction, which is not very adequate either. There's a long lumpen word ... what is it?"

"Psychogeography"? She pulls a face. "That's the one. But I think we can avoid that." She dislikes words that don't sit right on the tongue. It's why she sometimes writes in Scots. "I like the feel of it and the texture of it in the mouth, just to keep it flavoursome."

Political commentator Andrew Marr has compared Findings to the work of Gilbert White. Jamie is flattered but does not think many people will know of the great 18th-century English naturalist, although she thinks they ought to.

She knows what Findings is not. "I have a horror of it being filed under Scottish and the publisher has a horror of it being filed under Mind, Body and Spirit," she says. "Yes, they are all set in Scotland but it is not a book about Scotland."

It's the question she most dreads. Is she a Scottish writer or a woman writer? She is both and she is neither. She feels irritated and confined by "the assumptions and the baggage" that come with such definitions. "It seems to be part of the job to keep redefining and refreshing what these categories mean. There is nothing more irritating to a writer than to be told you are not doing it properly. You know, my job is to keep pushing it and pushing it."

Scottish "by latitude", she was born in Renfrewshire in 1962. Her family moved to Currie, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, while she was still a girl, and she considers herself a child of the capital. Her father was an accountant, her mother worked in a solicitor's office. There is no family history of literary merit. She can't account for her own gift, but says she started writing at school, "teenage stuff", and only for herself. She didn't excel in class, but, perversely, it was society's low expectations of what she might do career-wise that persuaded her to pursue writing.

"What we read at school was pitiful, we just read nothing, so I don't know how it started ... I did my exams like everyone but I made a muck of it. I had to skiddle around for a couple of years after school to pick up enough exams. It was not a positive decision to become a writer. It was a negative decision. The options held out to me were just so appalling. No, I don't want an office job for 30 years, thank you. There must be a way of getting around this ... I can really remember thinking there must be a way to live another life."

She went to Edinburgh University to study philosophy, and kept writing. It was around this time that she came to the attention of the poet Douglas Dunn.

Dunn, now professor of English at St Andrews University, where Jamie lectures part-time in creative writing, thinks it was Norman McCaig who first recommended her work. Dunn was entranced.

"She possesses what I call an innocent eye, which I find very beguiling," he says. "What was it William Blake said? As a man sees, so a man is. Well, as a woman sees, so a woman is. She is a very self-aware poet. My framework for poetry is that it has to happen between the ears - intelligence - it has to happen under the left nipple - bit of heart and feeling - it also has to happen between the tongue and teeth. If it doesn't happen between these places, it is not poetry. And she does that. And I like her work because of the way it engages with natural things. That's her main thing. She's also a witty poet and she's very inventive."

Her earliest efforts won her an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1981, and her first collection of poetry, Black Spiders, was published the following year, when she was 20. It won the Scottish Arts Council book award. In it, Jamie was already casting her eyes beyond Scotland, mixing lucid, evocative travel poems with snapshots from life at home:

This morning Abir will buy fruit in the market: her cane chair creaks to itself in the heat. She'll be home before the sun lies smashed on the streets. (From "Abir" in Black Spiders)

But Scotland, its identity, its quirks, its landscape, remained a steady thread through her work. In The Queen of Sheba, one of her most acclaimed volumes, shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize in 1995, and winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1996, she mocks, playfully, the sometime parochial pettiness of a small nation and its people. In the poem "Arraheids", a museum exhibit of flints is compared to the "hard tongues of grannies", who can't keep from muttering, "ye arenae here tae wonder, whae dae ye think ye ur?"

"She is an antidote to the sense that somehow that which is earthed in Scotland is depressed or introverted or down," says Donald Smith, director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre. "It is very serious, it is very challenging but it is very affirming poetry. It does rather set the lie that we either have to be miserabilist or best sellers."

The birth of her children brought Jizzen (1999), a collection named after the old Scots word for "childbed", and a new intensity to her writing.

"Oh whistle and I'll come to ye, my lad, my wee shilpit ghost summonsed from tomorrow," she wrote in "Ultrasound".

"Second sight, a seer's mothy flicker, an inner sprite: this is what I see with eyes closed; a keek-aboot among secrets. If Pandora could have scanned her dark box, and kept it locked - this ghoul's skull, punched eyes is tiny Hope's, hauled silver-quick in a net of sound, then, for pity's sake, lowered." The collection won the 2000 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Jamie shifts self-consciously on her makeshift log bench at the recollection of these successes.

"I published my first book at university and it never occurred to me to stop. Again, it's different now, there was no career structure. You just fumbled around and did things. Now, young writers are much more intensely aware of their career structure and placing themselves on it. I just knew very much I wanted to do it.

"It must have taken some sticking power. I just fell in love with it, discovering new ways of using the language. I used to think that language was what got in the way, that it was a screen, a dark glass. That you could not get at the world because you were stuck with language, but now I think that's wrong. Now I think language is what connects us with the world ."

She had always travelled, often on her own, revelling in contact with the local people she met. A natural empathy and gentle curiosity took her into homes and lives. In 1989 she went to Tibet with the photographer Sean Mayne Smith and together they produced The Autonomous Region (1993). A trip to the Northern Areas of Pakistan by herself in the early 1990s brought The Golden Peak (1993), a travelogue updated and reissued as Among Muslims (2002) after she returned to the region post-September 11. She went back after 10 men from Pakistan arrived in her home town, the small Fife community of Newburgh, in November 2001 on a peace march. By coincidence, a few days after she met them, a publisher called and asked if she would return and look again at the region in these altered times.

On her first visits, she had been effectively adopted by locals in Gilgit, off the Karakoram Highway, and formed close and enduring friendships with some of the women she met. "I felt weird, displaced, but not endangered," she wrote at the time. "If anything, I was aware of being co-opted, that responsiblity was taken for me whether or not I required it."

When she went back some 10 years

later, and in a much-changed world, it was with a companion and with her shawl pulled a little tighter around her face. But even amidst the uncertainy and tension of the times, and even though she was then the only westerner in town, she was remembered and welcomed.

"We sat around the oil-heater, with a kettle on top, and told about our lives, the lives of women with families," she writes in Among Muslims. "We had young children and frail, elderly relatives, and jobs. That's what 10 years had done; turned us from Shia girls and Western girls into grown women - mothers and daughters, wives and teachers."

Among Muslims was just what Michael Palin was looking for in his preparations for his own Himalayan odyssey. "It was just before I was about to start," he recalls. "We were going to Pakistan and I could not really find any good books about the people of Pakistan. There were rather dry texts or these books of derring-do from a different time. Then I came across her book. It is so beautifully written. She does write with a poet's touch.

"It is just about connections and communications between people, all of that which we have in common ... I responded to that. It is really rather the same way that I try to approach things when I travel. I have to stop myself pontificating and listen. That is what she does so very well. She listens and tells."

Jamie feels differently now about her travels and not just because of the realities of being mum to Duncan, nine, and Freya, seven. An early-morning call to her home reveals the happy havoc of a school morning. "Shoosh!" she shouts, above the insistent clamour of small voices.

"It's not just being the mother of a young family," she says later, on the beach. "That's the handiest excuse that other people understand, but what other people don't yet understand is that I'm getting seriously, seriously concerned about flying for environmental reasons. Just going halfway round the world to look at other people and say, 'oh, look, they want to raise their kids and have a happy life like me'. Why bother? Just leave them alone. I was starting to get worried about the ethics of travel. Just jump on a plane and go here for the weekend, never mind about the tonnes of carbon you're dumping. I really, really think we are going to have to address this. Do you hear that boys?"

Her call is directed at the other birds that have taken to the sky. The great grey forms of Tornado fighter jets streak and twist above the nearby Leuchars air base and Jamie's remonstrations evaporate in the roar of machines.

"I do get angry," she says. "We are all so complicit; implicated. It's too big. That's why we are not getting any political action. It's much, much bigger than a five-year political term. I wonder what our grandchildren will think?" She looks at the eider ducks, unruffled by the aircraft, bobbing on a slow sea. "But you come out on a day like this and the birds are beautiful and maybe, actually, it is all right."

So, might this growing environmental anger colour what she does next? She shakes her head.

"Other people do that. No, my job is not to get angry and proselytise. Mine is an imaginative connection. It would be easy to jump in and be judgmental and start ranting but it does not make for good writing, and a lot of what I wanted to do both in The Tree House and in Findings was get the ego out of the way and just look and see what's there. And people are not stupid, they don't have to be told what to think."

She doesn't relish the idea that she might be a voice. "For me, poetry is a sort of connective tissue where myself meets the world, and it rises out of that, that liminal place.

"When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it's not about voice, it's about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don't just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend." She rattles off the names of Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, John Clare and Annie Dillard.

Her conscience will, however, determine how she works. Plans to travel to the Arctic for the BBC "to see what's happening there" are in limbo. "It would be a wonderful, wonderful adventure," she says, "but at the same time you jump on three, four, five planes. You can't justify it."

Beyond that, there is nothing on her horizon. "My brain is empty and it will take a while to get some energy, so it will be a haul with no money. I'm completely flatlining. I don't want to write anything until I have something to write. I can go for a couple of years without doing anything. Then you get a bit panic stricken and say, right that's it. I have 20 years to get through, what am I going to do?"

It is a precarious existence for such a prodigious talent. A clutch of writer-in-residence posts saw her through her 20s, but Jamie says she didn't get a "proper job" until St Andrews offered her the part-time teaching post in 1999.

"Things were pretty desperate then; really struggling. I was very grateful to the university people who were organising it."

She makes about £7,000 to £8,000 a year from her writing. "It is difficult not to sound churlish," she says. "If you get an award of £10,000, that's wonderful, but it's what a dentist makes in three months. It is put up by philanthropic people, so, of course, I wouldn't dream of complaining. The perks of the job?" She looks around her. "Here we are on a Thursday morning."

It's a situation that frustrates fellow poet Don Paterson. It's lunchtime and Jamie has called him to see if they can meet for a sandwich at the university where they both teach. In the lobby of the School of English is John Burnside as well. Three of the UK's most acclaimed poets chat, warmly and conspiratorially, by the recycling bins. Burnside is on leave, a new dad in a crumpled T-shirt. He has just popped in to keep in touch.

The financial rewards for what Jamie does, says Paterson, are "just a joke".

"This is our support, for one thing," he says, indicating the building around him. "It is a recognition that there is something to contribute."

For Jamie, he says, that contribution is a clearsightedness and a willingness to let everyone come to their own conclusion. "That's far more powerful than someone telling you things you know. Kathleen is the last person to do that. And her work challenges as well. You are always excited. I'm her editor at Picador and it is fascinating trying to follow where her mind is going."

Burnside adds: "She is one of our handful of really important - I hate to use words like 'leading' - but actively important lyric poets. For the duration of the poem the reader experiences the same way of looking, that's what makes her one of a handful of really important poets."

He bristles slightly at a suggestion that Jamie may not be as well known or as appreciated in Scotland as elsewhere, that she is not yet a household name, like Liz Lochhead. "Anybody who doesn't know who she is or has not read her is missing something," he says, flatly.

Jamie, embarrassed that they have been asked to talk about her, rescues Burnside with a laughing, "that's more than enough".

Catherine Lockerbie, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, says Jamie is less well-known than some of her contemporaries. "She is a very private person, she does not relish public appearances, she lives quietly with her family in Fife. She has not built up a public persona in the way that some have. But I would put her absolutely as one Britain's finest writers. I might even say that she is one of of Europe's finest writers ."

For critic Robert Potts, Jamie's attitude is refreshing compared to some of her "more obviously self-regarding" contemporaries. "One of the things I like about her work is the quietness," he says. "She's a very unegotistical poet ... there is a sense of someone taking great care, in the proper sense of care, about what they're going to do and say."

Ian Jack, editor of Granta, suspects Jamie might have got "a bit lost in the great welter of Caledonian brutalism that has been the fashion for 10 years or so. There's a kind of poetic touch to her prose which does not help her to be fashionable." Her writing, he adds, has a quiet strength that comes from knowledge and devotion to her subjects.

Lockerbie, meanwhile, believes Findings may be the work that raises Jamie's profile, particularly as a writer of prose.

"I think she has been slightly overlooked as a prose writer. She has these quasi travel books which people have found interesting but have not been rated in any way like her poetry. I think Findings will change that. I think it is an utterly remarkable book that shows her openness and sensitivity to the land itself in prose form. It's a work of outstanding beauty."

Smith, meanwhile, believes Jamie's career is following a steady, well-trodden and stellar path.

"It takes time to make poets. It takes time for poets to develop their voices and engage. You can see her development curve really building and you can see there are great things ahead. Maybe she will be a much better-known name. She deserves to be. But it all takes time."

When she does write again, it will be about the natural world, the passion that has come to dominate her oeuvre. "And when at last the road gives out," she writes in"Whale-watcher", "I'll walk - harsh grass, sea-maws, lichen-crusted bedrock - and hole up the cold summer in some battered caravan, quartering the brittle waves."

"I can't think of anything more important to write about," she says. "What are you going to write about? Going to a supermarket? I think not. "

The summer, and a family holiday in Shetland, stretch before her after a difficult time. Her mother suffered a devastating stroke. Her grandmother "slipped into dependency". Her husband, Phil, fell victim to pneumonia. She met him, a cabinet maker, in Sheffield where she was staying after travels in China and Pakistan. He was a student of sculpture and the children, she says, have inherited his gift for art. She touches on it all in Findings

"We were surrounded by the very old," she writes in "Sabbath", as she and her sister prepared to persuade their grandmother that a care home was the best option. "The woman in the next chair was asleep, her chin reaching her chest. Next along was a woman who was awake. She wore a blue knitted cardigan - or rather, because her shoulders and breasts sloped at odd, tilting angles, a blue cardigan had been arranged around her."

"It just arose out of the circumstances," said Jamie, of the personal tone she has reached in the book. "Not much of what one does is conscious. What comes out rises out of life."

She hopes her work is spiritual, a role she thinks writers can and should play, but she is not religious, having "lost all patience" with Christianity and other monotheistic beliefs. She questioned her beliefs, however, when Phil fell ill. A friend asked if she had prayed. She hadn't. But she had done what she does best.

"I had noticed," she writes in "Fever", "the cobwebs and the shoaling light and the way the doctor listened and the flecked tweed of her skirt ... Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?"